9.7 Potentialities of Panarchistic Architecture

“casting even the sky above Disneyland in an eerie postapocalyptic orange glow, and lighting up satellite images with flames visible from space”. Wallace-Wells, 2017.

Having systemically and robustly interrogated the past, current, and possible near- future [>2100] ecological [4.1.1; 4.2.1 - 4.2.9; 4.4.1 – 4.4.3] wider environmental [4.1.2 – 4.1.5; 4.5.2 - 4.5.5; 6.1.8] architectural and urban [5.1.1 – 5.1.11; 6.1.2 - 6.1.7; 6.2.1-6.2.3; 6.3.2; 6.4.7-6.4.9; 7.1.1 – 7.1.5] and policy [2.11; 2.12; 6.1.9.1; 6.3.5] issues facing the wildland urban interface of the western United States, this thesis has delivered a bird’s eye view of the risks and opportunities as may lay ahead. In and of themselves, the statistics - be they relating to the volume of lives, properties, and livelihoods at imminent risk of loss to wildfires of record-breaking proportions, or to the rate at which the factors that increase fire frequencies, intensities, and severities, including average temperature, humidity, precipitation, ignition and WUI development rates, are shifting, or the speed at which both within and beyond the United States biodiversity, be it at the level of individual species or of biomes, is disappearing - are alarming. Scientists are worried. So too are many others. Arguably, they are right to be worried. As relates to wildfires, such is the heterogeneity of their causes, behaviours, and effects as to make evident the not one, but several reconciliations as required necessitate sophisticated, not simplistic approaches, and the statement thereof applies philosophically, ecologically, technologically, and sociologically. There will, to re-iterate McIntosh, be no “quick technofixes” (2008). The imperative thereof is compounded by the matter that whereupon that which, absent of such depth of research and due diligence as ensures its claims have merit comes to market, failure thereof to address such problems as it was intended to solve, at best, undermines investor and wider public confidence, at worst causes loss of life and of property, as evidenced in the series of failures that led to the Grenfell Tower fire, amongst many other tragedies as ought not have occurred.

While this thesis has presented not one, but a series of concepts with the theoretical potential for commercial research and development, such for example as they listed in the Panarchic Codex [8.1], the ‘opportunity’ of principle concern is that of contributing to the collective effort to prevent against worst-case environmental and social scenarios becoming a reality. In confronting those scenarios, original WUI constructs have been developed, they being constructs which, though provisional, modelled on the fire-adapted flora of the regional fire regimes, aligned to historically compatible vernacular architectures, and accommodating of the foremost critical external environmental [i.e. resource shortages, climate change, sea levels rises, etc.] and commercial factors [i.e. advances in ICT, Satcomms, materials, etc] of both present and possible near-future, address a wider range of issues than the predominant WUI paradigm of present. The proposition is complex, ambitious, and posited at a time of great uncertainty environmentally, socially, economically, and politically. But, the level of interest and support the proposition of Panarchistic Architecture and its philosophical and wider conceptual tenants have so far attracted [141], and in particular the creation of built environments which accommodate for the needs of non-human species, suggests its potential is sufficient to warrant ongoing research and development activities, including but not limited to research partnerships as could facilitate the ilk of in vitro and in natura experiments in fire-prone territories, industry surveys and other peer enquiries, and an array of media that extends the discussions as published in this thesis to a global audience via print, audio, and film. Collective endeavour, be that endeavour with civic, corporate, non-government, indigenous, and/or media organisations will be required to fully evaluate the proposition’s ecological, architectural, urban, technical, social, and economic potentialities, that being a process as has already been initiated in territories including Northern America, Southern Europe, and the United Kingdom.

The future is not the sum of linearly-arranged, exponentially growing parts, statistics, and binary decisions, therein the speculations as presented in this thesis constitute not ‘data’, but then, nor do the speculations of institutions as wide-ranging as the UN, governments, and multinational corporations. Perhaps, had rather fewer relied on assumptions and instead accommodated of wide-ranging “knowns” and “unknowns” [Fig. 92], while acknowledging there are “unknown unknowns” (Rumsfeld, 2002) many “beds”, to cite a well-known Australian rock band, might not “be burning” (Hirst, Moginie, and Garrett, 1987) [142]? Of course, Midnight Oil’s hit song was not about a biochemical fire, but a metaphorical one, and in the context of the need to redress the land and other rights of indigenous peoples. Western peoples cannot undo their imperialist past, but they can work with indigenous peoples to build a better environmental and social future, it being a future that benefits from our combined knowledge and knowledge systems, and all such imaginable and, currently, unimaginable creations as may birth therefrom. Architects, planners, policymakers, scientists, and technologists are but a few of they as need be involved in visioning such potentialities. As stressed in the discussion on the work of the late anthropologist Terence Turner, filmmakers, such as James Cameron, and other members of the creative community, including authors, and audio and visual artists, have an invaluable role to play in broadening societal perceptions of the ‘possible’. Hence, of the several follow-on and sister projects the research programme as documented in this thesis has so-far incubated, one is a publishing endeavour [143] which fuses science and art to present science-informed, and culturally diverse snapshots of possible near, medium, and far futures. Another community for which the findings and speculations as presented in this thesis are relevant is the insurance and re-insurance sector, more specifically they examining how emerging ICT and other systems could provide of new business models in fire-prone regions of the world.

>Continue to 9.8 here.

Footnotes

[141] See Appendix items 4, 5, 6, and 7.

[142] In reference to both the increase in wildfire activity in the study region, and to acts of environmental terrorism against indigenous peoples of forested lands in Indonesia, Brazil, India and elsewhere.

[143] In reference to the micro-publishing project the Future in Flash.

The thesis is also available in PDF format, downloadable in several parts on Academia and Researchgate.

Note that figures have been removed from the digital version hosted on this site, but are included in the PDFs available at the links above.

Citation: Sterry, M. L., (2018) Panarchistic Architecture: Building Wildland-Urban Interface Resilience to Wildfire through Design Thinking, Practice and Building Codes Modelled on Ecological Systems Theory. PhD Thesis, Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research [AVATAR] group, University of Greenwich, London.